


Petroglyphs

by orphan_account



Category: Prometheus (2012)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-25
Updated: 2012-12-25
Packaged: 2017-11-22 10:40:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/608934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Assholes with daddy issues and terrible communication skills. (For Lexx!)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Petroglyphs

**Author's Note:**

> This is a Christmas present for my dear friend Lexx, my perfect Vickers forever and for always. I promised her something really cute and this is as cute as it gets with these two.
> 
> She's literally sending me a rock for Christmas so I wrote about her sending me some rocks for Christmas.
> 
> I love you and the icy shards you have jabbed through your heart, may the rabid wolf sex prevail.

Thursday December 24th 20:00  
2 New Picture Messages [open?]

Thursday December 24th 20:00  
1 New Picture Message [open?]

Thursday December 24th 20:01  
1 New Picture Message [open?]

Fifield stared at his phone, waiting for it to buzz a fourth time. A minute passed, then another, before he decided to pick up the stoic device.

Thursday December 24th 20:03  
1 New Picture Message [open?]

He scrolled through menu options until he found [Open All Image Attachments], heaving a frustrated sigh at the poorly designed interface. His old phone had been simpler, made better, but certain company perks were nonnegotiable. Of course he'd picked the GPS tracker out from under the battery the first night, but he'd still have to use the rest of the device. He rubbed at his left eye, fingertips worrying over a hairline mark on his brow bone that wouldn't have scared had he not picked at it. The pictures were all from her, and sadly they weren't of her.  
Three samples of wulfenite like three Euclydian tongues of flame, one simple clear quartz cluster you could dig out of any backyard in the world, and an extreme close up of some fiercely yellow agate to finish the set.  
He flipped through them for a bit, pinching and pulling the images to inspect certain details of their crystaline forms. He pulled up three new messages and wrote three variations of a "crystal cleavage" pun before tossing his phone back across his desk in defeat.  
It pinged up at him dutifully.

[Save images to desktop?]

"Yes," he mumbled, running a hand through his beard.

[Save images to desktop?]

Fifield growled something about the smart phone's whore mother.

[Save images to desktop?]

" _Yes_ ," he said again, as clearly as he could through his frustration. There was a tense silence.

[Images saved.]

Five new icons popped up on his monitor, along with a small notification politely informing him of their arrival. He dragged then into an untitled folder in the top left of his screen and stared at his phone for three unusually long minutes before sweeping his materials haphazardly into his bag and heading for home.  
He passed her office on his way to the main staircase. The stainless steal doors were closed, fitting seamlessly together to bear a five foot wide Weyland Corporation logo. Beneath it in glittering letters the door announced, "Building Better Worlds".  
Fifield felt his fingers lift up from the strap of his bag as if his hand thought to knock on the doors in front of him. He squeezed his hand into a fist and walked away, muttering under his breath and scaring the life out of a small, mousy haired intern he brushed against in the hallway.  
A short balding man in a grey sweater gave him a polite nod at the base of the staircase, and the new girl they put at the front desk got the phrase "Have a pleasant evening" caught in her throat when she saw the severity of his expression. As Fifield leaned against the side of his bus stop he paused to wonder if anyone in that building had ever heard his voice.  
She had.  
He shook his head and pulled his phone out from the pocket he'd shoved it into. For a moment he was disappointed at the little tab at the bottom of the screen that informed him he had [No New Messages], until he remembered that she had nothing to reply to.  
She never had anything to reply to, he realized suddenly as he let a young girl in a green pantsuit get on the bus before him. He never sent her anything back.  
When he took a seat he pulled his phone out again to leaf through his drafts. Most were abandoned halfway through a word or a sentence. One of them was just the letter 'Y'.  
Fifield tapped the screen thrice, more forcefully than was absolutely necessary, and it complacently went dark, the logo of his courier flashing briefly before it did so.  
He pulled it back out of his pocket fitfully for the rest of the trip, never turning it back on to start a new message but never letting it be long enough to put the issue out of his mind.  
Two kids sitting on the third floor stair-rail of his building asked if they could bum a cigarette and lit up like Christmas bulbs when he obliged them. He wondered if she smoked.  
Fifield pressed his thumb into the small green touch pad on the front of his door and felt the tiny prick of a needle half the width of a human hair lap up a drop of his blood. The door hummed for a moment before giving a satisfied _bing_ and swinging open smoothly.  
He set down his bag and threw his jacket over the back of a chair, crossing the room to turn the heat up on the neat little control panel tucked into his wall. He pulled his phone out of his pocket as he did so, turning it on with his left hand as his right plugged in the temperature, first in Celsius by force of habit. Looking down at the bright little screen staring up at him, he wondered why exactly he'd turned the damn thing back on.  
Fifield was finishing a cigarette on his balcony when he heard a gentle tapping. He turned, shivering as he felt the night air around him. It was Basalt.He opened the sliding door and the cat gave an assertive yowl. He didn't want to come out he wanted Fifield to come back in.  
The geologist crouched and extended a hand, brushing his knuckle against Basalt's nose and receiving a hard bite in return. He always purred loudest when he bit people.  
Fifield stepped inside, nudging the cat back in with the tip of his shoe, and picked up his phone again. He wrote a message that he deleted, and went to bed.

Friday December 25th 07:00  
1 New Picture Message [open?]

Fifield looked up from his laptop, trying to figure out where his phone was calling him from. He found it under a book shelf, cheerfully displaying his new notification. It was Inesite, pearly pink and built like broken snowflakes. He closed the message and threw his phone back under the shelf.

Thursday December 31th 23:30  
1 New Picture Message [open?]

Thursday December 31th 23:33  
1 New Text Message [happy new year wolf boy. three days to get over ur hangover]

Wulfenite again, bright orange, with a party hat photoshopped hurriedly onto one of its peaks. Fifield pulled up a text message.

[three days for 3 more hangovers]

He pressed send before he could convince himself otherwise, and got no reply.

Over the next three days he received five pictures of calcite, the last of which was a mislabeled piece of chromite, and two of a sample of brilliantly orange agate that he'd seen on display in the natural history museum downtown. He wondered if she'd taken them herself. He couldn't picture her in a museum, surrounded by warm blooded creatures. 

His alarm rang dutifully at six am on Monday January 4th, and he silenced it immediately since he'd been awake since six am on Sunday January 3rd. Basalt had apparently been sleeping near it because Fifield's fingers came back to him bloodied. Cursing the mangy hairball as he fed him, the geologist grabbed an unfortunately bitter cup of coffee and powered up his phone. [No New Messages]

The bus that morning was empty, no doubt the result of New Year's resolutions to walk to work to spare waist lines or the environment. He tossed a gum wrapper into the trashcan near the front door and got an incredibly accomplished sounding 'Good morning, sir' from the girl at the desk, who looked like she'd practiced addressing him over the weekend. He growled at her and she kicked off from the desk in a panic, sending her chair rolling three feet away from him. Rolling his eyes, Fifield made his way up to his office, noting the spare bits of confetti stuck into the austere grey carpet, leftover from whatever New Year's jubilee this floor had been a part of. He left his bag, his jacket, and his thermos full of unfortunate coffee in his office, and made for the break room which he prayed would be empty.

It was, and the coffee machine gleamed invitingly. He keyed in his desired amount of cream and sugar and leaned against the counter as the sleek contraption whirred to life. A hand appeared on the edge of the counter next to his left, attached to- oh, her.

“Did you really muster three more hangovers Mister Fifield, or is that expression how you greet every morning?” she said, with an unusually warm edge to her cold, authoritative voice.

Fifield choked out a laugh, and the _ping_ of the coffee machine filled the small silence that followed. He put his right hand around the foam cup but didn't lift it, turning his head slightly to address her, but staring still at her hand on the counter top.

“It was chromite,” he said.

She looked confused, “What was chromite?”

He turned his head completely, taken a bit aback by the intensity with which her eyes bore into him. She was dressed and poised in her usual corporate style suit, the shiny grey fabric matching the rest of the building she ran along with the extreme severity of her expression. Her hair was down, brushing the middle of her back in a perfect platinum swath, not a strand out of place. Had he not heard her speak he wouldn't have thought it possible for her face to break the rigidity of its features to make use of its mouth. Her icy eyes darted down to his hands, up to the hairline mark over his left eye that she'd seen heal from a sizable gash, across the geometric patterns inked into the left side of his head and then back to his eyes. Her gaze was systematic, as if her eyes were performing a systems check. Fifield leaned towards her, shifting his shoulder up from their usual slump to reach her at her usual perfect posture. In one fluid motion he stretched his neck out and she bent her head down and for a moment or two their lips pressed gently together.

They pulled apart slowly, each trying to out glare the other in case the gesture proved to be a mistake.

“Well,” he murmured, “not that.”

“Shut up, wolf boy,” she said curtly, and he let his free hand cup her face when he kissed her again.


End file.
